Sunday, January 20, 2013

Giving it to the students

A deeply-thought article by Rachel Cusk in yesterday's Guardian Review, considering the value of teaching creative writing - not only for students, but also in relation to the creative well-being of teacher-writers and our culture in general.

With searing insight she identifies the impulse which sends students flocking to courses:

Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language; the student feels a need to assert a 'true' self through the language system, perhaps for the reason that this same system, so intrinsic to every personal and social network, has given rise to a 'false' self

and her article is steeped in a need to honour that. Market-driven publishers, she points out, do not always do so - publication is not always 'an assurance of quality', and this justifies the need for the kind of academic haven for writing which painting and music have always enjoyed:

academic institutions offer a shelter for literary values, and for those
who wish to practise them

But what of the writer-teacher? With unerring precision, she puts her finger on a conundrum here:

the role of teacher, like that of parent, effectively ends what might be
called creative unself-consciousness. The teacher/parent is under
pressure to surrender, as the phrase goes, the inner child, to displace
it into actual children, to become scheduled and reliable in order to
leave the child irresponsible and free. For a writer, who may have
fought every social compulsion to "grow up", whose inner world has been
constellated around avoiding that surrender, this is an interesting
predicament. Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as
a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.
So the writer is giving to others the service he might customarily have
given himself.

Some writers will be creatively diminished by this, she says, others made bigger, enriched, and in a perhaps politic gesture, she leaves it there, so it's a conundrum that remains unaddressed in the article. Yet I suspect it's one that's crucial to the whole subject: more than once have I given up teaching creative writing for the sake of my own writing self, and thus the sake of my own writing - exciting as I do find teaching, exhilarating and stimulating as the writing community of a university can be - and I can't remember the number of times other teacher writers have said to me - or announced at readings - that if they had my opportunity (a partner prepared to foot the bills) they'd do it too. Cusk rather brushes aside the need for money that leads published writers into teaching, listing it as only one reason alongside possible others. Last September I heard a complaint (in a workshop discussion at a two-day celebration of the 60th
anniversary of Stand Magazine) that, while it is now essentially the
academy that funds literary writers, writers - especially poets - seem
reluctant to acknowledge their academic affiliations in their biographies; on the contrary, they were taking the money and running. Other reasons that bring writers to the academy, says Cusk, are an interest in the subject and a desire for social participation, and (again in contrast to the Stand complaint) a desire (of which she rightly seems not to approve) for the professional profile that attachment to an institution confers,
and for the way it can 'ward off the suspicion of amateurism and the
insecurity of creative freedom'.

It occurs to me that every reason Cusk lists is essentially selfish: she doesn't include a love of teaching for its own sake, or a desire to bring other writers forth into the world. I'm pretty sure from this article, and her previous piece for the Guardian, that Rachel Cusk has these last qualities and is one of those brilliant and committed teachers of creative writing, but the overall view of creative writing teaching she provides is, in spite of her project of defence, less heartening.

Is it possible that those writers most able to divest themselves of their self-oriented writing identities for their students are the ones who find it most difficult to keep going at both? And if it is, what does it mean for students, for the academy, and for literature? I'd call it more than 'interesting.'

'An analytical, and sometimes funny, take on the world of fiction reading, writing and publishing' - The Cerebral Mum'Other than the fact that the lady writes well, with insight, empathy and personality, that she speaks her mind and shies not from confrontation when such is necessary and constructive ... there is really no reason for me to visit her blog' - Alan Kellogg

'Pretty great all the time' - Scott Pack

About Me

Elizabeth Baines is a writer of prose fiction and plays. Her collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World (2007), and her novella, Too Many Magpies (2009), are published by Salt. In 2010 Salt also reprinted her first novel, The Birth Machine. Elizabeth has won prizes for her stories and plays including a Giles Cooper Best Radio Play Award and received Sony radio nominations.